In June 2017, halfway through our work on this volume, an unusual piece of news made headlines around the globe: Serbia, a highly patriarchal and post-conflict country, got an openly lesbian prime minister (e.g., Bendix 2017; Verseck 2017). 1 The decision of the newly minted president Aleksandar Vučić to give Ana Brnabić a mandate to form a new government was yet another steep turn on the centuries-long emotional roller coaster of regional politics. 2 As scholars of Eastern Europe who survived the turbulent 1990s of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and lived through the confusions that preceded and followed it, both of us (Marija and Bojan as editors of this volume) thought that we could hardly ever again be surprised with the hybridities—loops, labyrinths, delays, and accelerated advances—that characterise our “semi-peripheral” existence and swing our personal and professional trajectories in directions which we cannot anticipate. 3
However, in spite of this rather unfortunate habituation, we were nevertheless taken aback by the short temporal arch—of only 16 years—which separated disturbingly lesbophobic/homophobic imagery of the first Belgrade Pride Parade (see Kajinić, this volume; see also Bilić 2016a) from a poorly known official who not only assumed what is, at least nominally, 4 the most important executive position in the country, but also became the second openly lesbian head of government in world history. 5 Ana Brnabić “has risen from obscurity” (Wintour 2017, online) both within LGBT activist circles and in terms of mainstream political party membership to induce a profound shift within symbolic layers that shape the ways in which we imagine those who hold political power (Laufer and Jovanović 2017). This unexpected appointment not only made Serbia an exception among its East European neighbours, but “fast-forwarded” it to the ranks of countries with much longer traditions of (homonationalist) non-heterosexual emancipation. 6
Thus, as is often the case in unstable environments, the domain of the inconceivable all of a sudden shrank to confront us with ambivalences which arise when the silenced, the marginalised, and the despicable rapidly climb the ladder of power. 7 And as if that were not enough, our surprise reached new heights just a few days later—the minimal amount of time necessary for completing preliminary “blood cell counts” 8 that are fundamental in the regions in which people supposedly dream of nationhood. Upon learning that Brnabić was neither more nor less than “one quarter Croatian” (B92 2017; T. P. 2017), were we not justified in fearing that all of our efforts to highlight the need for more intersectional accountability in both scholarship and activism (Bilić and Kajinić 2016; Bilić and Stubbs 2016; Radoman 2013, 2016) were at risk of evaporating in irrelevance?
Although—or exactly because—we were not immediately sure what to think about this “intriguing move” (Tanjug 2017, online) of the Serbian ultra-nationalist-cum-European democrat president, Brnabić’s precipitous rise to global visibility convinced us even more that the time was ripe for taking stock of the achievements, tensions, contradictions, and emotionally laden processes of post-Yugoslav lesbian activisms. Through our own engagement with activist politics and friendships, we have been for years evoking a more lesbian world, a kind of world that would, we thought, once and for all put an end to widespread misogyny and hollow illusions of masculine perfection. Our friend Lepa Mlađenović (2016a) refers to lesbian nests as welcoming shelters in which one can find refuge from unbearable patriarchal dominance that reaches its climactic points in violence, war, and environmental devastation. We thought that in spaces led by lesbians, which would be sustained by understanding, solidarity, and mutually recognised fragility, we would finally feel secure enough to slowly start doing away with secrecy and leaving behind that tiring need to offer multiple, quite different, accounts of who we are depending on how homophobic we feel our interlocutors—usually our own loved (and possibly not anymore loving) ones—could be (Huremović 2017; Radoman, this volume). 9
How were we then supposed to reconcile this profound, unquenchable need to be seen in the entirety of our complex and fluid desires with one of the earliest new prime minister’s statements that Serbia was not “that homophobic” (Tanner 2017, online)? How are we to understand and support a lesbian politician—that potential embodiment of our hopes—so willing to succumb to an authoritarian man who publicly says that the idea of taking part in a Pride March “does not cross his mind” and that he will do something “useful” instead (FoNet 2017, online)? How can we be seen with our sexual diversities, ageing bodies, physical incapacities, weaknesses and ever more strangling precarities by people who only two decades ago wreaked havoc on our communities and gambled on our futures? Is lesbianity 10 expected to mask—and does its visibility necessarily stem from—an uncritical integration of our region into the global capitalist system that asks us to relinquish our socialist past as an infantile utopia to which we cannot return (Gligorijević 2017; Maljković 2017)? To what extent is each and every one of us, even if unwillingly, complicit in the rapid dispersion of the leftist core of emancipatory non-heterosexual politics which begins with the contradictions that neoliberal capitalism inevitably pushes us into? If some of us are so willing to have an easy recourse to class privilege, how can we understand the ways in which our specific social and geographical positions seep into what we can possibly do with our gender orientations and sexual yearnings? 11 In these new troubling circumstances in which the cause of sexual liberation is being ever more increasingly appropriated by nationalist and conservative forces, who can really claim to be an heir to the courageous revolutionary visions that inspired the very first instances of intersectionality-sensitive lesbian activism? 12
(Re)Politicising (Post-)Yugoslav Lesbian Activism
It is such intricate and painful questions that we encountered on our collective voyage into the largely uncharted waters of post-Yugoslav lesbian activist initiatives. Given that we enjoy travelling together—and only fleetingly come into existence as a nomadic microlocation that reconstructs, in novel ways, our shattered cultural space (see Bilić, this volume)—we have taken with us not only generations of scholars who made it possible for us to emerge in life/writing, but millions of voices that struggle with the darkness of oblivion to appear and poignantly speak to us of shame, fear, humiliation and regret. As we are waiting for meticulous herstorians 13 to “look through the margins, gaps, discrepancies, ruptures, and breaks” (Chou, as cited in Garber 2005, p. 43; see also Bennett 2000) that hide thick sediments of women silence in Eastern Europe (Herzog 2013; see e.g., Dimitrijević and Baker 2016), we turn to activists—those who, not without personal conflicts or clashing ideological commitments—guide lesbian desire towards articulation so that it can acknowledge and appropriate its own name 14 and find its way out of the suffocating seclusion of a single body.
While completing this volume in December 2017, we hear the echoes of feminist activists—our friends, teachers and co-authors—who exactly 30 years ago, in December 1987, gathered in Ljubljana, 15 the hub of Yugoslav “new social movements” (see Oblak and Pan, this volume), to imagine better futures for themselves and for us. Ironically, little could they know that very soon their country would be torn apart through a series of armed conflicts which not only produced in...